The telephone industry currently offers its craftspersons a variety of impact tool configurations for cutting and seating individual telephone wires in terminal blocks that are mounted to telephone office mainframe units. For an illustration of documentation describing a variety of non-limiting examples of such impact tools, attention may be directed to U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,195,230, 4,696,090, 4,567,639, and 4,241,496 and the patents cited therein.
Typically, an impact tool has a handle from which a wire-gripping and cutting head extends. The interior of the handle may contain an axially translatable hammer element, which is biased by a compression spring to strike the cutting head, and thereby cut one end of a wire that has been seized or inserted into a wire capture and gripping end region of the cutting head. As the craftsperson grips the handle and pushes it against a wire in a terminal receptacle, a hammer release element within the handle is moved into alignment with the hammer travel path, so that the forced stored in a main spring is released, causing the hammer to rapidly impact the cutting head, so that the end of the wire is cut and becomes seated in the terminal.
One of the principal shortcomings of the type of impact tools currently in use is the need for the craftsperson to push the handle with more force than is required to compress the main spring. This need for additional force is due to the fact that the hammer release element employs a (wedge-configured) push-plate that must be moved transverse to the hammer's translation axis, in order to achieve alignment with an insertion slot, and allow the hammer to be released. Since the push-plate is moved by the application of force along the handle axis, the total amount of axially imparted force required to operate the tool is that required to both compress the main spring and move the push-plate. As a consequence, its use is time-consuming and labor-intensive, thereby increasing the cost of installation of telephone equipment.
It would be desirable to reduce the amount of effort required to operate the tool, and thereby lessen the labor burden on the craftsperson. In so doing it would also be desirable that the tool have the ability to seat and cut multiple wires at substantially the same time.